The configuration of many electronic devices is often associated with the framework of a particular developer or manufacturer of the device processor. For example, it is widely known that certain desktop systems or operating systems employ a particular framework for an application to operate with the operating system. Few open source solutions, however, allow for embedded multi-process window systems to scale from low-end to high end graphics systems. There exists a need for an improved solution to provide a window system for embedded systems, and in particular for open source solutions. Three convention solutions include the X11, DirectFB, and Wayland frameworks.
The X11 project started in 1984 out of Project Athena. Much of the original design remains and is generally considered an awkward fit for modern graphics systems. Regarding embedded systems, X11 is generally considered as a bad fit because of its size and complexity. With current embedded systems, size may no-longer be a big issue, but systems problems stemming from the complexity of X11 remain an issue.
DirectFB 1.x is designed to unify access to Linux frame-buffer devices. It provides a drawing application programming interface, unique to DirectFB, which is a superset of unique accelerate graphics application programming interface exposed by each Linux frame-buffer device driver. Support for DirectFB by open standard drawing application programming interfaces is weak, and DirectFB implements its own graphics buffer management. Although improved graphics are proposed for later versions of DirectFB, an incompatible re-write will most likely result in the framework and depreciate the application programming interface.
Wayland provides many desirable requirements for window management, but development of Wayland is not mature enough to provide a window management system. Its dependencies are difficult to implement on an embedded system that a network application program is likely to be run on. In additional, Wayland uses existing technologies in the Linux kernel mode-setting (KMS) and the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) batchbuffer in order to provide a minimal display server.
Accordingly, there is a desire for a graphics framework and embedded windowing system for an network application program to provide useful technological solutions and functionality that may improve graphics quality.